“Artists attach no importance to externalities,” replied Fräulein Jasmina with knitted brow.
“A great mistake. He always looked as if he had just come out of a bandbox. You remember, don’t you?”
The other two nodded. The three then walked down the garden path, arm in arm.
III
Daniel was standing in the vegetable market before the Goose Man Fountain, eating apples.
The sun was shining, and he noticed that the shadow of the fountain was moving slowly toward the church. It made him sad to see that time was passing and how it was passing. When he turned around, however, and saw that the bronze figure of the man with the two geese under his arms was not merely indifferent to the passing of time but confident that all is well, he could not help but laugh.
What made him laugh was partly the calm of the man: he was always waiting for something, and he was always there. He was likewise amused at the thought that two geese could make a man look so contented.
IV
As Daniel was going home one afternoon from a piano lesson, he met Eleanore Jordan. He told her about his new room and the three bizarre creatures in the house in the Long Row.
Eleanore had heard all about them. She said they were the daughters of the geometrician Rüdiger, and that he had left the town some time ago because of a quarrel with the citizens, or rather with one of the gilds. The origin of the trouble was the picture of a certain painter. More she did not know, other than that Rüdiger had gone to Switzerland and lost his life by falling down one of the mountains. The sisters, she said, were the laughing stock of the town. They never left the house except on certain days, when they went out to the nearby cemetery at the Church of St. John to place flowers on the grave of that painter.